When you think about it, chess has a lot in common with art. For one, you have to practice to get better and better at it. Studying the greats can help increase your depth both in art and in chess. You also have the factor of talant which applies to both fields as well. This is where someone has a natural ability to excell at a much quicker rate than most. FInally, I'd like to retort to your boss's remark by saying that chess intellect is all about experience, not the ability to just be smarter than everyone else. This means an intellectual genius can be terrible at chess and vice versa for the chess genius. Some can excell at both, but you can't quantify a chess professional as somebody who could have found the cure to cancer instead of studying chess.

As for Kramnik's remark, I'd only correct it by saying somone around 1700 can start to deeply appreciate art in chess via watching masters play. That is not to say people below that rating cannot appreciate chess. It just means by this level you can understand deep moves but might not actually find them yourself in practice. For example, when I was a 1200, I'd watch masters play and be consfused most of the time as to why they didn't do such and such. I'd be saying, "what the heck?". Now years later, I can watch masters play and be thinking, "Oh nice! Yes! I bet he'll sac the rook here... yep, he did". I'm sure you get the idea of Kramnik's comment this way.

Hikaru,

     Thanks for replying to my post.  Yes, I agree.  Hard work is an undeniable factor in the success of a performance artist.  Average intelligence/talent + hard work should should outperform above average intelligence/talent + laziness.  This guy might have thought that the only kind of intelligence is fluid intelligence not crystal intelligence.  And, that the general mental skills required to play high level chess (memory, spatial reasoning an visualization) are easily transferred to other areas (specialties really).  And while there may be some truth to this argument , it completely dismisses the passion and acheivements of a set of people based on their benign career decision.  It may be true, perhaps that the long term impact will be felt mostly within the confines of the chess community.  So I boiled it down to: he wouldn't pursue chess.  But I won't feel guilty for pursuing a field which I genuinely feel passion for. 

On another note.  I've been toying with the idea of writing a piano piece of music based on a chess game. I would use leitmotifs for each piece and also use the squares as a construct for the piece.  And counter-balance all of the theoretical basis with an aesthetic sense of direction and movement.  I enjoy your chess playing and style and thought that one of your games would make a particularly good game to use.  This would make my first attempt at writing a piece of music based on a chess game,  one of your blitz games.  If there is a game that you feel best represents your style, with your permission I'd like to base my piece on that game.  I particularly liked your game against Bu with which you finished the recent tournament in Gibraltar. 

Thanks!

Thank's for your reply Bogdan Is chess art?  This is an interesting debate, although I don't really intend to debate the question here.  It seems that chess is closer to being a sport than an art.  Competitive elements do exist in many artistic arenas.  Michael Jordan's basketball playing was beautiful and graceful, and yet we think of it more as a sport than an art.  We could refer to the learning or performance process as an art, say like the art of playing the endgame, or the art of soccer.  But to say that it is an art might seem to be stretching it.  On the other hand, Jazz wasn't considered an art, nor was it accepted as "art music" by the music establishment for many years.  I believe one of the reasons that chessplayers may feel that what they are doing is art, is that, unlike other sports, spectators can play through the game, make the same moves that the original performers made and derive more from the experience.  I felt emotions, as a  musical artist, which were completely foreign to me after learning chess.  I scarcely played some 30 games when I started playing in tournaments last year at 30 years of age.  I didn't even know what en passant was, nor that you couldn't castle through check!  But, I agree with Kramnik, that chess is highly emotional.  I've learned so much about myself.  The moves I make under this or that kind of pressure.  So, maybe, also, I'm stretching it to say that I'm feeling someone's experience when I go through their game... I forgot to list one other mental skill in one of my former posts which I consider highly vital to playing good chess.  Creativity!  Of course a good boxer must be creative and so must other sportsmen.  All I can really say, I guess, is that I feel something similar to the feeling I get when I play the piano or compose a piece of music when I'm playing chess.  What is art?  and of course this is another discussion!